A Death in the Family

The Steering Column

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On February 11, Car and Driver's senior technical editor, Don Schroeder, was measuring the top speed of a RENNTech Mercedes-Benz on a 7.7-mile oval track at Ft. Stockton, Texas. During the course of this test, something went terribly wrong and Don lost control of the car, which left the pavement and crashed. He did not survive.

All of us at Car and Driver can scarcely accept that we will never again see Don's cheerful face. No longer will we hear him defending GM styling for taking a risk on the whalelike 1991 Chevrolet Caprice, or recalling his escapades, before he came to the magazine, behind the wheel of his 1984 twin-stick Dodge Colt GTS Turbo. We'll never again hear him earnestly promoting the urban recovery of the city of Detroit, where he had purchased -- some said bravely -- a grand old home years ago. We'll never hear him spewing verbal fireworks in political arguments with one of the more conservative members of the staff -- such as myself. Although we all intellectually accept that he's gone, in our hearts many of us imagine that he's just off on a long trip somewhere and he'll come strolling through our front door any day now.

That is not to be, of course, leaving us to make some sense of his death at the age of 35. Stripped to the basics, Don died in pursuit of a number for our test-results sheet. It was for top speed, one of several numbers that describe the performance of a car. For 30 years, we at Car and Driver have done nearly everything possible to acquire those numbers, which we consider critical in evaluating a car, through the most thorough and accurate methods available to us.

We view the act of measuring a car's performance independently, and then comparing it with the manufacturer's claims, as critical to automotive journalism. It's the equivalent of a good political reporter thoroughly and relentlessly dissecting the health-care proposals of Al Gore, or George Bush's plan to cut taxes. The reporter examines the offerings, line by line, to see if the politician's proposals can in fact deliver their intended benefits, at their claimed costs.

We take testing so seriously that we only trust our own people to do it, with few exceptions. In this way, we not only ensure that our measurements are consistent but also position ourselves to gather firsthand impressions of performance at the limit and deliver them directly to our readers.

Finally, by driving a car to the limits of its performance, much faster perhaps than any owner ever might, we verify the integrity of a car's construction, the soundness of its engineering, and the thoroughness of its development.

I firmly believe that our record of methodically and accurately testing a wide variety of cars for the past 30 years has made Car and Driver the magazine of record in our industry. And although we have certainly cooked countless clutches, fractured numerous gearboxes, blown a bevy of engines, and shredded more than our share of tires over the years, this was the first actual crash -- let alone fatality -- during instrumented testing that any of us could recall. That said, neither our safety record, nor the genuine benefits of testing, seem to count for much in the aftermath of Don's death.

Such concerns were far away when Don Schroeder joined our staff in September 1990. As have been virtually all our testers, Don was an engineer, with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied science from Lehigh University. And like most of his testing predecessors, Don had worked in the auto industry; in his case, engineering top mechanisms for ASC in 1989 and '90.

Don had a lifelong fascination with cars. His father tells a story of Don's watching him redo the brakes on the family car and correctly noticing that Dad had installed one of the components backward. What's special about that? He was four years old. Don's high-school friends from his hometown of Syracuse, New York, relate tales of his daring driving antics that sound eerily similar to my own and those of many staffers. When Don came to Car and Driver, he was so brimming with enthusiasm that we had no choice but to hire him.